The Divide

28

The blow co

Roch allowed himself a brief rush of satisfaction, then turned and ran after Amelie.

Ru

He tripped over a spur of concrete and almost dropped the flashlight; he managed to recover, but it gained Amelie some critical time. He stabbed the flashlight forward and saw her disappear down the empty stairwell—a miracle she had found the ladder in this darkness, but of course it was his own light, his own trusty Eveready, that had led her there. “Bitch!” he screamed, and drew out the copper pipe and bounced it against an aluminum conduit suspended horn the ceiling. The sound rang out around him like a bell, metallic and cacophonous in this closed space. Amelie ducked her head down below the floor … but Roch didn’t follow.

He was frozen in place … paralyzed by the sudden and terrible suspicion that he had done something momentous, something irrevocable … that he had jackknifed off the high board into an empty pool. How had he arrived in this dark, cavernous hallway? Basically, what the fuck was hedoing here?

But there was no answer, only the keening of the ventilator shafts down these blind, scabbed walls.

He clenched his teeth and suppressed the doubt. Maybe there was some truth to it, maybe hehad taken the dive without looking; but when you get this far, he thought, it just doesn’t matter anymore. You’re up there in the spotlight and you tuck and spin because it’s the focal point of your entire life even if you don’t understand it, you just know, so fuck all that pain and death that’s rushing up at you; that’s after. Now is now.

He hefted the copper pipe and turned back to the burning room.

29

Susan saw Amelie stumble away from the shadow of the building and knew at once that something had gone terribly wrong.

Amelie was sick or hurt. She took five lunging steps into the snow and then seemed to lose momentum—stopped, wobbled, and fell forward.

Susan ran out from the cover of the trees. The snow hindered every step; it was like ru

She put her arms around Amelie and lifted her up. Amelie was trembling. She was cold to the touch, and her eyes wandered aimlessly… Susan guessed some kind of drug might be involved.

“Amelie!” Some recognition flickered in her eyes. “Amelie, is John inside? Is he all right?”

“He’s in there,” Amelie managed.

“Is he hurt?”

“He’s with Roch.”

Susan stifled a powerful urge to go in after him. She took a deep breath. Do what you have to. “I’ll take you to the car,” she said. “Then we can call the police.”

They crossed the railroad tracks and ducked under the link fence toward the Honda, both of them breathless and gasping by the time they reached the car. Amelie doubled over against the lid of the trunk, her cheek pressed to the cold metal. Susan turned back toward the warehouse, one edge of it still visible over a stand of snowy pine trees. She shielded her eyes and frowned at what she saw: a thick plume of white smoke had begun to waft upward from the western corner of the building.

30

The warehouse had been stripped bare years ago. Everything even remotely valuable had been sold or stolen. There was no furniture left to burn; the floor was pressed concrete; the exterior walls were brick. But there were ancient kiln-dried spruce studs: there were pressboard dividing walls where these lofty spaces had been partitioned into offices; there was an immense volume of sub-code insulation that had been installed by the contractor as a cost-cutting measure during a 1965 renovation. Altogether, there was plenty to burn.

John awoke to the burning.

The Sterno can had spilled flaming jelly across the floor, the bulk of it next to three exposed wooden structural studs.

The wood was porous and spectacularly dry. The flames licked at it, paused as if to gather strength, then ran upward to the ceiling beams and through an open airway to the third floor, where they encountered a five-foot-high stack of the Saturday edition of the Toronto Sun dated through 1981.

The flames relished it.

Awake now—dimly—John rolled away from the heat. A glowing ember flaked down from the ceiling and scorched the skin of his wrist. His lungs felt raw, sandpapered. He opened his eyes.

He saw the flames ru

His head hurt. When he moved, the pain was dizzying; nausea constricted his throat. The agony was so generalized as to seem sourceless; then he touched his head above his left ear and felt the pulpy texture of the skin there. The hair was matted and wet. His hand, when he pulled it away, glistened in the firelight. This wetness was blood.

Blood and fire all around him.

He remembered Roch.

The overheated air created by the flames was vastly lighter than the cold, stagnant air surrounding it. It shot upward almost volcanically, coursing through the abandoned building like a river cut loose from the restraints of gravity. Where stairways had fallen, it rose through the gaping spaces. It discovered flues and airways. It was merely warm by the time it reached the top of the building, but still hot enough to seek out an icy five-foot gap where the ceiling had collapsed and to rise, lazily at first, into the still afternoon air.

This was how Susan saw it from the Honda: a waft of almost pure white smoke.

It gathered strength.

John understood that something was broken inside him. That was the way it felt, and it might be literally true; Roch had hit him pretty hard. He was confused about this place and he was confused about whether he was “John” or “Benjamin”—or what these names implied—and just about the only thing he was not confused about was the urgency of getting out of the building. The building was on fire; it was burning; he could be trapped here. That much was clear.

He managed to stand up.

He saw the flashlight on the floor and picked it up. He could see well enough in the firelight but he might need this later. There was a thin veil of acrid smoke all around him—fortunately, most of it was still being drawn up by the rising heat. That might change, however. And even this faint haze was choking. Combustion products. Toxic gases. These words floated up from memory, briefly vivid in his mind: he could read them, like printed words on paper, in the space behind his eyelids. But the danger was real and imminent.

He staggered into the hallway, where Roch was waiting for hire.

Roch came forward in a lunge with the copper pipe extended, gri